


The Demon Market

by mermaidism



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Christina Rossetti - Freeform, Gen, Love, Poetry, Religion, Sisters, The Goblin Market, literally all the literary references i could make
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-05 02:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10295381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermaidism/pseuds/mermaidism
Summary: a retelling of Christina Rossetti's classic poem, "The Goblin Market" with Mina and Vanessa as Laura and Lizzie“We must not look at goblin men,We must not buy their fruits:Who knows upon what soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?”for Sarah Notbecauseofvictories because she asked for it a while ago





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notbecauseofvictories](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/gifts).



They wander through the London market, arm-in-arm. They do not look like sisters—Mina is fair; pink and round, while Vanessa is tall and thin as an iron spike. Her dark hair pools with shadows. But there is something in the way they walk together: their smiles, how they laugh at nothing, the way their hips brush together, that reveals the truth of their sisterhood. (In another story, they might have had names like Margaret and Mary…Adeline and Anna…Laura and Lizzie…) In this story, they are Vanessa and Mina, and as they walk through the London marketplace, the fruit sellers sing their two-note melodies, holding out their wares as Eve offered her own fruit to Adam.  
“Fruit-for-sale, fresh fruit-for-sale!”  
“Come buy, come buy!”  
“Apples and quinces!”  
“Oranges and lemons!”  
“Red raspberries!”  
“Sweet mulberries!”  
“Fruit-for-sale, fresh fruit-for-sale!”  
Tall Vanessa ducks that handsome black head to whisper in Mina’s rosebud ear. Their eyes meet under thick lashes, and they laugh.  
They leave the marketplace with nothing, their arms still linked. Behind them, the fruit sellers sing on.

 

Later, the sisters huddle in Mina’s bed. It is midnight, and Sir Malcom’s house is silent. The harvest moon outside the window throws amber shadow on the floorboards, and their whispers braid together in the half-light.  
“There was a man in the market today,” sighs Mina. Her eyes are bright with moonshine, dreaming of skin and pomegranates just as Persephone dreamed in another story.  
“I didn’t notice.” Vanessa’s long fingers dart like pale scorpions along the edge of the satin coverlet. Her whisper catches on the word _didn’t_.  
Mina knows this is Vanessa’s lying-voice, but her cheeks are lit with blushes and her fingertips are stinging; her mind is filled with other, wilder thoughts. (Vanessa can feel them spreading hotly from the ends of Mina’s yellow hair.) Vanessa turns on her side, away from the window and Mina and that burning moon.  
“You should not let him look at you.”  
Mina, sleepless and sweaty, does not hear.

 

Another afternoon.  
Again, the almost-sisters wander through the London marketplace. The fruit-sellers sing their songs.  
“Fruit-for-sale, fresh fruit-for-sale!”  
“Come buy, come buy!”  
Today there is a carnival set up in the streets, and the sisters stay into the twilight. Vanessa sits upon a carousel horse, watching the fruit market melt into the wharf melt into the harbor melt into the sea melt into the market again. Whenever she passes before the fruit market, Mina waves an ungloved hand. Then…  
The carousel makes its final, sepulchral turn and the falling sunlight does not land upon Mina’s golden head, her outstretched arm, her rose-petal gown. Vanessa is on her feet at once, dizzy and faintly sick. The carousel music buzzes like a thousand wasps in her ears.  
“Mina!” she calls, stumbling into a tangle of children eager to take her place on the merry-go-round. They frown and push past her; this wild-eyed, pale woman with night in her hair.  
“Mina!” Vanessa calls again.  
The fruit-sellers hold out their apples and quinces, their oranges and lemons; sweet mulberries and red raspberries. Vanessa pushes their hands away. They curse her as she hurries on, still calling for her sister.  
The dying light of the sun catches on a glint of gold, and there is Mina in her soft gown. She stands at a strawberry stall, smiling at a man in a black suit. When he smiles back—Mina is too close to see; her heart struggling too wildly to care—his teeth are sharp.  
“Mina!” Vanessa screams, though she had intended to whisper.  
The girl in the pink dress turns, as if in a dream. And, as if in a dream, Vanessa sees that her eyes are fevered and her throat flushed. Mina looks at her dark sister, and smiles.  
“Vanessa, come and taste…come and meet…”  
_Come and taste what? Come and meet who?_  
Vanessa does not stay to hear. For the man beside Mina turns his face to her and the lust that flames up in his black eyes almost knocks her to knees. She has seen this man in this dark suit before. She knows what he intends for her clear white skin and her black curls and her secret soul. Vanessa runs then; runs like a coward and leaves her trembling, thrumming sister there with the demon in the fruit market.

 

And in that marketplace, as the sun dips below the horizon, the demon in the black suit turns back to Mina. His hard, square fingers trace the cupid’s bow of Mina’s mouth. His whispers are warm against her swan’s neck and she leans into him, eyes closed and lips parted.  
“Try a strawberry, my sweetling,” he purrs.  
When she opens her eyes, he is holding a berry before her. The tiniest moan escapes her lips at its perfect heart-shaped redness. The demon’s eyes gleam. (Another girl in another story was offered another berry in the same way. She paid dearly for it. Mina does not know this tale. Vanessa is the one who likes to read.)  
“But I have no money,” she breathes. She could cry for the lack of what it would bring her.  
The demon’s hands curl in the yellowness of her hair.  
“There are other ways to pay, my love.”  
His mouth is on her throat, and Mina is lost.  
“Yes,” she gasps. “Yes…”  
Mina reaches for the fruit.  
“No, no, sweetling. Not like that. Open your mouth…those round pink lips of yours, my little love. That’s it…now…”  
And as her teeth break the delicate skin, Mina’s mouth is filled with a sharp sweetness she has never dreamed of. She sucks it dry, licks the juice from his fingers with trembling tongue, already hungry and moaning for more. And this demon has more…  
She eats and sucks and laps and devours until there is nothing left but the moonlight upon the cobblestones. And then…then it is the demon’s turn.

 

Vanessa does not sleep that night. She cannot answer Sir Malcom’s questions, even when he takes her thin shoulders and shakes her so that her black hair falls free and her eyes swim with stars. He has gone out into the night to search his daughter out, but Vanessa knows he will find her not.  
She kneels alone in her room in the silent house and she prays. The black beads of a rosary dangle from her shaking fingers, dripping like blood from her close-pressed palms. The whispered words tumble in a breathless tangle from her pallid lips… _avemaria, gratiaplenadominustecum, benedictatuinmulieribus, sanctaMariamaterDeiorapronobispeccatoribus, nuncetinhoramortisnostrae, amen_ …and again, and again, and again, and again. Until she cannot feel the pain in her knees, her elbows, her hands, her heart. Again and again until the words have no meaning whatever and the rosary cross leaves its tiny, perfect image upon her right palm. Over and over and all through the night, Vanessa prays while monstrous shadows dance upon the wall and long-legged spiders roam beneath the hem of her nightgown. Just before dawn, the too-tall vaporous form of some great winged creature rears up behind the girl called Vanessa. Her tongue, so desperately sure until now, stumbles and she half turns.  
“Mina!” she calls out.  
But then the sunlight is blushing against the eastern sky and Vanessa is alone.

 

Mina returns, unlooked for, in the morning. She drifts out of her father’s embrace, ignoring the kisses he presses against her cheek and his cries of relief and joy at her homecoming. Without a word, she climbs the staircase to her dark-haired sister.  
“Oh Van,” Mina sighs. She is still round and pink, but something has been scooped out of her. She looks without seeing and touches without feeling. “You cannot dream of the fruit I have eaten of this night, what peaches and berries my lips have been pressed against, the sweet juices I have licked from my fingers. Tomorrow, Van…tomorrow we’ll go back and you’ll see…you’ll taste…you’ll kiss…”  
Mina falls upon her sister’s bed, weary with longing and gorged with lust. Vanessa slips into bed beside her, smoothing the sticky yellow hair away from Mina’s forehead and gently kissing her pink shoulder.  
“Hush now, sister. Hush and sleep.”  
Mina sleeps, and Vanessa keeps watch.

 

Evening comes.  
Vanessa wakes from fretful sleep to find Mina whispering in her ear and plucking at her sleeve.  
“Come, Van,” Mina wheedles. Her eyes shine star-bright and her yellow hair blazes in the sunset. “Come to the market. We’ll slip out so silently that Father will never know.”  
“Mina, you need to rest.” Vanessa cautions to no avail. Mina hears her not.  
The memory of the fruits her golden sister has tasted burn upon her tongue, and she hungers. Oh, how she hungers.  
They slip like shadows over the cobbles, down, down, down to the wharf where the fruit sellers are packing up their wares in the half-light. Breathless, Mina leads Vanessa on.  
“Fruit-for-sale! Fresh fruit-for-sale!” an old woman cries, peddling the last of her apples and pears. “Apple for the dark one?” she cackles, thrusting her fruit under Vanessa’s nose.  
Vanessa pushes the thin arm away and hurries after her sister.  
All at once, Mina stops to peer into the mist. The sun has fallen behind the sea, and the sky is streaked with dusky purples and smoking pinks. A tall man in a dark suit leans at his leisure against a strawberry stall. He turns a silk hat over and over and over in his hands.  
“Mina…” Vanessa chokes on her sister’s name. “Mina, let’s go.”  
Mina strains further into the gloaming, looking for what Vanessa has already seen.  
“Don’t look at him, Mina,” Vanessa begs. Her voice trembles and she is ashamed of it, but nothing can bring her any closer to the smiling demon in the black suit. “Oh let’s go, Mina…please, let’s go!”  
“I don’t understand…”  
Mina has fallen still. Her blue eyes, once sharp and bright, are now stricken; her heart still as stone.  
“I don’t understand,” she bleats again. “I don’t see him. Where is he Van? Where are the strawberries? Where are his kisses? Take me to him, Van! Oh please, Vanessa, please! Why has he abandoned me?”  
The man in the dark suit smiles his wicked smile. In his outstretched hand, he holds a strawberry, the color of sin.  
“Come taste, darkling,” he whispers.

 

Many hours later, Vanessa hears him still as she kneels to her prayers. She starts as a cold hand finds her own, but it is only Mina. Her eyes are round and dull and sleepless.  
“It was you he wanted, wasn’t it? It was always you.”

 

Mina does not eat anymore. Not even Sembene can entice her to pick up a spoon. She sits alone in a straight-backed chair before the fire in the parlor, muttering to herself and crying out for strawberries. Her yellow hair has turned dark and dingy as dirty straw. Her wrists have become sickly slender, her lovely round face hollowed. The doctors Sir Malcom calls all give the same pronouncement: Mina is dying, and there is nothing to be done.  
In the room she once shared with a laughing and pink sister, Vanessa sits in another straight-backed chair and stares at the crucifix above the cold hearth. She thinks on another story: one of a simple man from a simple town who walked into a garden to give himself up to death. She has prayed for this cup to pass from her lips for so long. But Mina is dying. Sweet, lovely Mina who taught her how to braid her hair, how to kiss, how to laugh. Mina, who cheated at hide-and-seek, and kept every secret ever shared with her; who rescued kittens from rubbish bins and shook her haunted, dark sister awake from nightmares. The only person Vanessa has ever loved. To die for her might be sweet.

 

Another, final twilight.  
Vanessa goes alone to the fruit-market on the wharves. Alone, and all in white. It was never her color, but it was Mina’s. Perhaps it will give her strength enough to do what she must.  
The sun has set and the wharves are empty. There are no cries of _apples and quinces…oranges and lemons…_ The air is still and thick with fog. Vanessa watches and waits in the stillness where the battle cry of her heartbeat is the only sound. And then…  
“Darkling.”  
The voice is heavy and soft with longing.  
Straight and proud as iron, Vanessa speaks not.  
“You have come to me, my love,” the voice croons, and now it has hands. They encircle her hips and dance across her collarbone.  
Still, Vanessa speaks not. Her eyes are dark and determined. She wears a cross between her shoulder blades.  
“Will you not speak to me, darkling? Will you not part those lips for me? Will you not taste of my fruits?”  
And now the voice is the demon in the dark suit and he stands before her, offering a not a strawberry, but his own pale neck. All in white, Vanessa trembles; her eyes squeezed shut. The breeze from off the sea has never been more fragrant. The stars have never burned more fiercely. She has never wanted to live so much as she does now she is about to die. There might have been a man she loved, with grey eyes and steady hands. There might have been children with her hair and boyish laugh. There might have been whole worlds to see and long years in which to see them. No more. That is for Mina, now.  
Somewhere, a church bell is tolling the hour. Vanessa opens her eyes.  
“Let her go free, and I am yours.”  
She looks up at the pearled rib of the moon so that the demon’s smile will not be the last thing she sees.  
“Done,” he hisses.  
And then his mouth is at her throat, and he is hungry no longer.

 

In the morning, Mina reaches for her breakfast, and it is sweeter than anything she has yet tasted, or ever will again.  
The sunlight burns the mist from the streets where the fruit-sellers come with their cartons.  
“Fruit-for-sale! Fresh fruit-for-sale!”  
“Apples and quinces!”  
“Oranges and lemons!”  
“Come buy, come buy!”  
The strawberry stall is as empty as the room on the second floor where the crucifix hangs on the wall.

 

END


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